So, long story short, I’m going to have some surgery this week and will thus be unable to attend this year’s Ruby Conference. I should be nearing the end of my recovery by the time the conference rolls around, but will probably be unable to travel (comfortably) by that time. It’s a drag, since I enjoyed the first three so much and was looking forward to seeing everyone again this year.

Once I’ve recovered and am up to speed, I still plan to put together a presentation or article on Ruby and RDF. As I’ve discussed in some previous blog posts, there are a number of interesting RDF-related projects under development. In the spirit of looking for a silver lining and all that, this may be the opportunity I’d been looking for: to try to get something published in one of the popular programming magazines (like Dr. Dobbs Journal or Linux Journal). We’ll see.

I love days like today when other people provide the content and I just link to it.

Gavri Savio Fernandez alerted readers of the ruby-talk mailing list about a recent article by Martin Fowler on the use of closures in languages like Smalltalk, Lisp and Ruby. As you might expect, Martin does a great job of explaining the utility of closures to users of less dynamic programming languages like C/C++, C# or Java.

In explaining the differences between closures and seemingly similar programming language features (like function pointers in C) Martin makes an especially insightful observation that I hadn’t ever considered:

“Languages that support closures allow you to define them with very little syntax. While this might not seem an important point, I believe it’s crucial – it’s the key to make it natural to use them frequently. Look at Lisp, Smalltalk, or Ruby code and you’ll see closures all over the place – much more frequently used than the similar structures in other languages. The ability to bind to local variables is part of that, but I think the biggest reason is that the notation to use them is simple and clear.”

I’m not a Smalltalk or Lisp programmer, but this certainly jibes with some of the most frequently cited advantages of Ruby, namely, its expressiveness and readability.

Anyways, go read the article now. Even if you think you know the whole story on closures, I think you’ll appreciate the conciseness of Martin’s description. I wonder if we can get him to write something on continuations next?

Justin Rudd has written about his experience trying to get the MySQL extension for Ruby to build properly on Windows. It seems as though I had to do this once upon a time and ran into similar headaches. One wonders why this extension isn’t included in the one-click installer for Ruby.

As of this writing I have six Gmail invitations, so if you are one of those few people who wants a Gmail account and doesn’t already have one, just send me an e-mail. The invitations seem to be pretty free-flowing these days and I’m guessing this means that Google is getting ready to go live with Gmail. So far I’m only using my account for mailing list subscriptions, but it does have a nice interface compared to the other Webmail services I’ve tried.

Update: All the invitations have been handed out.

OK, I promised Andy I wouldn’t post this link until the first of the month. He kindly dug up the original PowerPoint presentation for his “Ruby Insurgency” talk from the first Ruby Conference, and has now published it at the Pragmatic Programmers’ web site. Thanks, Andy!